Meet four heart-health advocates helping women get the care they need

Here at Woman's Day, we've made it our mission to raise awareness about the number-one killer of women: heart disease. A big highlight is our annual Red Dress Awards, a star-studded gala during which we honor incredible people who are making a big difference in the fight against heart disease in women. This year's event, which benefited the American Heart Association's (AHA) Go Red For Women movement to educate and inspire women to take action to keep their hearts healthy, took place on February 15 at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City. Meet our remarkable and inspiring 2012 honorees.

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Star Jones

American Heart Association National Volunteer; attorney, author and TV personality

A week before her 48th birthday in March 2010, Star Jones had successful open-heart surgery to repair her aortic valve. "I knew something was wrong when I was fatigued in the 'my body feels exhausted' way, having heart palpitations and getting light-headed," she says. "I'd lost over 150 pounds with the help of weight loss surgery in 2003, so the symptoms weren't adding up."

After an intensive three-month cardiac rehabilitation program, Jones became dedicated to raising awareness of heart disease in women. For the past year, she's volunteered tirelessly for the American Heart Association's Go Red For Women campaign. "Heart disease is notfatal if it's diagnosed and treated," says Jones. "We're always there for our husbands, children and friends, but we have to start making our own health a priority. I learned late in life that my health is my greatest asset. As the proverb says, 'She who has health has hope, and she who has hope has everything.'"

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Katherine K. Leon & Laura Haywood-Cory

WomenHeart Champions and heart disease research advocates

When Katherine Leon had a heart attack in 2003 at just 38 years old, doctors said that it was due to a rare condition called Spontaneous Coronary Artery Dissection (SCAD) in which the coronary artery tears. Even worse, "no one could tell me why it happened, if it would happen again or whether my children were at risk for it. There was no research," says Leon. So, thanks to the online community of WomenHeart: the National Coalition for Women with Heart Disease, Leon gathered 70 SCAD survivor stories and asked Sharonne Hayes, MD, head of Mayo Clinic's Women's Heart Clinic in Rochester, MN, to research the condition. She and Laura Haywood-Cory (who had a heart attack from SCAD in March 2009 at age 40) recruited participants for a pilot study.

Leon and Haywood-Cory trained as WomenHeart Champions (women's heart health advocates) at the WomenHeart Science & Leadership Symposium at the Mayo Clinic in 2009. After the successful pilot study in 2010, Dr. Hayes developed a SCAD patient registry and a databank of DNA samples from patients and their families to test for genetic mutations. "By tracking SCAD patients, who are mostly women, we hope to discover the causes and how to best treat and prevent it," says Dr. Hayes. Over 200 people have volunteered for the registry so far; Leon and Haywood-Cory continue to gather and support survivors. Says Leon, "We hope no SCAD patient will ever hear, 'This is so rare, you'll never know what caused it.'"

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Danny Clark Photography

Martha Gulati, MD, MS

Section Director for Women's Cardiovascular Health and Preventive Cardiology at The Ohio State University Medical Center

Dr. Martha Gulati decided to focus her career on heart disease in women during her second year of medical school. "Even though heart disease is the number-one killer of women, I was shocked to learn that, at that point, women had been left out of most clinical trials on heart disease," she says. Dr. Gulati's groundbreaking research (published from 2005 to 2011) has enabled doctors to more accurately assess a woman's risk of heart disease. Her findings established new guidelines for what a woman's fitness level should be based on her age and set new standards for what her heart rate response to exercise should be. "To give women a fair chance at beating their heart disease odds, we must study how their hearts are different."

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